#MeToo speech acts – Elaine Blair on testimony, reporting & film

Elaine Blair, une prise d’analyse discursive (et narrative-énonciative dans l’expression cinématographique) sur les témoignages, discussions et débats juridiques et médiatiques de l’agression sexuelle. “The Limits of Language”, NYRB May 2023. Dont :

• 2004 ff, “in the mid-Aughts, advocacy groups for sexual assault survivors began to publish guidelines for journalists covering sexual violence. “Reporting Sexual Assault: A Guide for Journalists” … battle with public perceptions, current tropes, “social sensibility”… Also, the substantial corpus of knowledge built since the 1970s, social research of all types, including surveying “data from a new kind of institution emerging in the 1970s: the rape crisis center“. Studies of jury behavior…
• #MeToo : “Reading these guides from the other side of #MeToo, you sense small but potentially significant rupture, a before and after, a shift in social perception. We have now collectively read or listened to thousands of reports of sexual abuse in many different industries and institutions: state capitols, restaurants, prisons, churches [schools]. … The sustained coverage of sexual exploitation over the past five years is unprecendented. [Corpora are generated, and available for study.] The authors could not have anticipated the way that such density of reporting would relieve the pressure on individual writers.”
• Andrea Dworkin testimony, and maturing of speech capacity; C-SPAN take of a bookstore appearance (date ?) :

I came out of the Women’s House of Detention mute. Speech depends on believing you can make yourself understood. That a community of people will recognize the experience and the words you use and they will care. You also have to be able to understand what happened to you enough to convey it to other people. I lost speech. I was hurt past what I had words for.

(“putting words on”, “having word for” : itself a newly opened trope, now safe and classic, anchored, and rote)

• on several recent film attempts, most adapted from books… : “Still, #MeToo has been a movement driven by the written word: the personal experiences shared on social media, the reporting published – and funded – by newspapers and magazines. Tara Burke’s Unbound (2021) and Chanel Miller’s Know my Name (2019).  // on film failures or “limits”, final word of the article :

The archives of cinema and popular entertainment are already filled with images of women’s tears and blood, after all; they’ve been something of a specialty.

C’est donc : qu’une étude de poétique a de la matière ici, vive articulation culturelle, où l’esthétique est à une place vive, hors (ou alors clairement dans l’) esthétisation.
Même type de travail que Jennifer ?, de Warwick U, sur les impositions de mise en récit des témoignages officiels de migrants. Ici le Dissensus, Lyotard, lointaine mais pénétrante ébauche.

Elaine Blair passe bien en faisceau les différents plans qu’il s’agit de relier, lire ensemble : témoignages policiers et juridiques, dont différents supports (et cultures) médias, couverture médiatique et débat public (“question sociale”), reprises élaboratives en art. “Adaptations” ou autres ; socialisations en culture, culturalisation.